Chap. XXVI. I next consider the nature of what I call the balance of wealth. The more circulation there is in a country, the more this object becomes important. While the greatest part of a nation’s coin was locked up; or while it circulated by rapine and extortion, the effects discovered in modern times, where it circulates by industry, and as an adequate equivalent for services, were hardly perceived.
The specie, or circulating coin of a country, must be considered as a part of the national patrimony. This is constantly changing hands in a country of industry, and he who is proprietor of any part of it, is in so far a proprietor of the public stock.
With this species of property, every other may be acquired. When it is given as the price of land, such an exchange produces no alteration in the respective situation of the parties. An estate in land is neither better or worse than another in coin of the same value. If I purchase an annuity, or pay off my debts with the coin I have in my pocket, neither I or the person with whom I transact, make any change of situation in point of wealth.
But if I lay out my coin for consumable commodities for my own use, then so soon as any part of what I buy is consumed, I become poorer: for this operation annihilates, in a manner, as to me, the coin I had. This I call a vibration in the balance of wealth; I grow poorer, and he who produced the consumable commodity for my use, is so far richer: the balance, therefore, is turned against me, in his favour.
As many people, therefore, live by producing consumable commodities, one use of coin is to render inconsumable, as it were, that part of them which is superfluous to our own consumption. By this operation the superfluity passes into other hands who consume it, and the coin which the industrious receive in return purchases a supply for all their wants, in proportion as they choose to relieve them.
The vibration of the balance of wealth, therefore, is no more than the changes which are daily taking place, as to the relative proportion of riches between the individuals of a state: and as this vibration can only be produced when the coin any one possesses comes to disappear, without his retaining the possession of any real equivalent which he can alienate for the same value; it follows, that the balance is constantly turning in favour of those who either sell their effects, their service, or their work; and this balance they retain, in proportion as their gains exceed their own consumption. On the other hand, the balance is constantly turning against the idle consumers; because they are supposed to produce nothing; consequently, the whole of their consumption goes in diminution of their wealth.
Hitherto the question has only been about the balance of moveable wealth, that is coin; but the introduction of this, together with a taste for superfluity, has the effect of melting down solid property into what I call symbolical money.
When once this refinement upon the use of money takes place, we see houses, lands, jurisdictions, provinces, principalities, crowns, scepters and empires, thrown into circulation by means of the symbolical money called bank notes, transfer in bank stock, accounts, bonds, mortgages, alienations of domain, mortgage of taxes, and cessions made in definitive treaties.
As frugality and industry are in our days capable of amassing the greatest fortunes in solid property, so is dissipation, by the means of symbolical money, as certain an expedient for the annihilation of them. From this I conclude, that dissipation implies frugality, and frugality dissipation. In every country of great circulation, they balance and destroy one another; and since there is no such thing as equality of fortune to be preserved without proscribing alienation, that is circulation, the next best expedient for making people equal, I think, is to enrich them by turns.
I conclude my chapter by inquiring into the effects of national debts upon the vibration of this balance; and I conclude, from the principles laid down, that with respect to the collective interests of the state, that is, between the state itself, the creditors, and the people, there is no vibration of wealth produced by loans to the public. But that according as the money borrowed is spent in the country or abroad, in so far the balance is either made to vibrate between individuals at home, or to turn against the state in favour of foreign nations.